Eloquent, thorough reporting by Earl Swift from Virginian Pilot from 2002, about the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, lived through the lives of our military service members and employees who survived. Miraculously, the plane hit the one part of the Pentagon that had Kevlar in its outer skin, having recently been rebuilt!
This is mostly a story of heroes rescuing victims, except for one unnamed General who discouraged rescuers, who ignored his cowardly ukase.
We're the United States of America, and we all stand together as one. I just wonder: whatever happened to the Unknown General, a member of the authoritarian elite who have thoughtlessly put lives in danger for generations.
From the Virginian-Pilot:
Out of Nowhere, Part 1 | Sept. 11 at the Pentagon
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Up at 5:30, Army Lt. Col. Marilyn Wills grabbed a shower, got her two daughters out of bed, and jostled her husband, Kirk, for a place at the sink. She pulled on her uniform, packed lunches, hurried the girls to dress and brush their teeth. There wasn’t time for her family’s daily Bible verse that Tuesday, nor the prayer the four usually said together, nor even to see Portia and Percilla off to school; Wills doled out quick kisses instead, and was out of the house before the sun came up.
In the car she sang along to a Gospel song on the CD player, and when it ended, she replayed it and sang it a second time, then a third. "Jesus, build a fence around me every day," she sang. "Guide and protect me, as I travel along the way."
She rolled through the District, swung onto Interstate 395 and crossed the Potomac. On the river's Arlington bank she pulled onto a great lake of asphalt, found a parking space that corresponded with her place in the military food chain, grabbed her knapsack and gym bag. She swiped her badge to enter the building, pulled off her Army-issue beret, and ducked into a bathroom to check her hair.
As she did, John Yates was on his way into work, and feeling few worries. He was newly remarried, madly in love with his wife, happy. Nothing on the job pressed him. And it was a beautiful morning, a gorgeous morning, balmy and bright under a sky of unbroken blue.
At the same time, Lt. Kevin Shaeffer "slugged" to his Navy job, catching a lift with a stranger so they could use Interstate 95's carpooling lanes. Dropped off just outside, he crossed the enormous seat of American military power toward his office.
They were among thousands converging on the Pentagon. Men and women, soldiers and sailors, Marines and airmen, civilians and visitors, they filled its parking lots, walked its 17 1/2 miles of hallways, hurried to desks spread throughout 3.7 million square feet of office. They kept coming until 23,000 of them were crowded under one roof.
That's how last Sept. 11 began.
___
At 9:43 that morning, a hijacked airliner would pancake onto the ground just outside, blow through the Pentagon’s 2-foot-thick shell, and slide deep into the offices of its first and second floors.
But that calamity was 2½ hours off, and inconceivable, when Marilyn Wills stepped into the bathroom. America was not at war. Few workplaces in the world felt as safe as the heavily built and guarded Pentagon. And it was a Tuesday, after all, the most innocuous, the most nondescript day of the workweek, a day given over to routine in offices throughout the country.
An Army major was at the mirror, fretting: While changing into her uniform she'd discovered that she had no socks. Wills recalled that she had a spare pair stashed in a drawer. She walked to her second-floor office, a vast room of 130-odd desks ringed by cubicles, dropped off her bags, found the socks, and returned to the bathroom. "Oh girl," the major told her, "you're a lifesaver."
Back at her desk, Wills turned on her computer. She checked her phone messages, then her email, then began to prepare for a twice-monthly meeting at which she'd be making a presentation.
___
After parking his truck, John Yates stopped at a Pentagon cafeteria for a guilty pleasure — an order of grits with brown sugar — then strode down the Fourth Corridor, one of 10 wide halls radiating from the building's middle.
The Pentagon is a mammoth doughnut, its five-acre hole encircled by five narrow, concentric rings of offices, labeled alphabetically; the A Ring is the innermost, the E Ring out along the perimeter. A right turn off the Fourth Corridor took Yates into a "cubicle farm" he shared with the men and women minding the Army's intricate personnel policies. The second-floor space, just renovated, stretched from the E Ring all the way through the C.
He crossed the room to his desk, passing Marilyn Wills' cubicle on the way, and turned on his computer. It promised to be a busy but unremarkable day, like most. Yates was the security officer for the deputy chief of staff for personnel, and was charged, among other duties, with ensuring that his co-workers had the proper security clearances and kept them up to date.
He'd had the job almost nonstop since 1988, when he was an Army staff sergeant. After his retirement, he'd returned as a civilian to the same desk, same files and same routine. Most of it was pleasant: Yates enjoyed conversation, and the job gave him a chance to chat; he liked to move around, too, and most days, the 50-year-old Florida native covered four or five miles of hallway.
On occasion, of course, it wasn't so nice. Leave a classified document on the copier, and before long Yates' meaty, 6-foot-2 frame would loom overhead. "Here comes John," his co-workers would joke. "What did we do this time?" Some in the office had taken to calling him the Grim Reaper.
Yates checked his email and went through his telephone messages. He rolled up his shirt-sleeves. He pored over a set of briefing slides he'd made for his boss, on the lookout for errors. Busy but unremarkable. A typical Tuesday.
___
When Kevin Shaeffer had started work at the Pentagon, he had been on crutches, and for weeks after that he was "that young lieutenant with the cane" — not the sort of distinction that the handsome, athletic Naval Academy graduate enjoyed. Now, 18 months after snapping his thigh bone in a motorcycle wreck, he was finally getting back to normal. His limp melted away a little more each day.
The 29-year-old lieutenant rode an escalator to the first floor and headed toward the building's outer edge on the Fourth Corridor. Halfway to the E Ring, the wall on his right was broken by a pair of heavy steel doors, 7 feet tall. He swiped his ID badge through a card-reader beside them, punched a four-digit code into an adjacent keypad, and heard the electronic lock click open.
The doors were the only way in or out of the Navy Command Center, where sailors monitored world events around the clock, kept track of the Navy's 317 ships, sifted through intelligence from the farthest-flung ports and sea lanes. He headed for the men's locker room, traded his shorts, polo shirt and sandals for polyester khakis, then walked to his desk.
Like the Army office directly overhead, most of the Command Center was a single room, divided by shoulder-high partitions into four- and five-person cubicles. Shaeffer shared his, near the room's center, with three senior officers, his colleagues in "N513." They were the service's big thinkers, its eggheads; in the 1990s, N513 had redesigned an armada built for Cold War showdowns into a smaller, smarter, more limber force geared to coastal combat, and Shaeffer helped blueprint the service's continuing evolution.
Shaeffer sat down at his desk and went through his messages. A few feet away, a rectangle of partitions cordoned the watch team, where large-screen televisions hung from the ceiling and sailors watched for breaking news. Nothing seemed to be going on.
His cubemates were seated around him, keyboards clacking, by the time he turned his attention to the Early Bird, the Pentagon's daily roundup of military-related stories from newspapers across the United States. He tried to read the handout front to back every morning.
But on this Tuesday, there wasn't much news in the Early Bird, and what little there was failed to grab him. Around the world, it seemed, all was quiet.
___
Away in the Northern Virginia suburbs, Sgt. Maj. Tony Rose let his toy poodles, Tippy and Butterscotch, into the yard. He was alone that morning, his wife visiting relatives in the Midwest, so he didn't linger; he jumped into the shower, then into uniform, then slugged into the office.
Rose was 46, a compact man of 5-foot-6 and 160 pounds, an Army lifer from the blackwater swamps of coastal North Carolina. He had enlisted his first week out of high school, in June 1972, which made him a rarity — an active-duty soldier whose career dated to the fighting in Vietnam.
Rose hadn't seen the war. He'd trained as a paratrooper but had broken his neck and back in an accident, so the Army had moved him into supply work, and eventually career counseling. Now he was the service's top career counselor and its top retention NCO, tracking why his colleagues left the service and drumming up incentives for the good ones to stay.
He walked to his desk at the back of the big room and said hello to Master Sgt. John Frazier, with whom he shared a cubicle. They were among the lucky few on the personnel staff whose desks received any natural light; a few feet away, a row of windows overlooked a service road between the Pentagon's B and C rings.
Career counselors had to undergo schooling at a big conference each November, and that Tuesday Rose was preoccupied with the 2001 event; by day's end, he hoped to close a million-dollar deal with the headquarters hotel. He checked his email and phone messages, then he and Frazier walked to the Pentagon's main cafeteria, notepads in hand, to drink coffee and chart out the day.
At 8:10, about the time they started back to the big room, American Airlines Flight 77 lifted off from a runway at Washington Dulles International Airport, bound for Los Angeles. It was a big machine, more than 50 yards long, its wings equal in area to the floor space of a three-bedroom suburban house. Empty, it weighed as much as a diesel locomotive.
In addition to the fuel in its belly, and the luggage and U.S. mail in its holds, the plane carried two pilots, four flight attendants and 53 passengers.
And five men planning mass murder.
___
Out in the field, lieutenant colonels like Marilyn Wills commanded the Army's battalions. In the cubicle farm, a lieutenant colonel commanded roughly 42 square feet of carpet.
Wills had spent nearly half of her life in uniform: The coming May, when she'd be 41, she would have 20 years in, the bulk of it in law enforcement. She'd risen through the officer ranks with military police units in Alabama, Louisiana and at Hampton's Fort Monroe, on deployment in Honduras, commanding an M.P. company in Germany. She'd served as force protection officer for Bill Clinton's second inauguration, and as provost marshal at Fort Myer, the Army post adjoining Arlington National Cemetery. She'd spent four years on the staff at West Point.
But no field work adequately prepared an officer for duty at the Pentagon, where the hours were long, the workload heavy. Wills' job was especially frenetic in September, as the federal government's fiscal year neared its end: She was a congressional affairs contact officer, responsible for keeping the boss, Lt. Gen. Timothy J. Maude, apprised of Army business on Capitol Hill, and answering congressional queries about Army personnel policy.
She shared the duty, and her cubicle, with a civilian, Marian Serva, who'd trained Wills when she arrived in 1999 and had since become her friend. Serva had a teenage daughter, and knew the trials a mother faced in raising girls.
That morning they chatted as the lieutenant colonel organized papers for her upcoming presentation. Across the room, John Yates printed the briefing slides off his computer, then photocopied the prints so that his boss could distribute them at the same meeting.
By that time, Col. Phil McNair, usually the first into the office and the last to leave, had been working for nearly three hours. McNair was Lt. Gen. Maude's executive officer, and as such, the personnel staff's hub; the 47-year-old Texas native was responsible for farming out Maude's directives and keeping him up on news from around the office, the building and the service. He also was a gatekeeper, his desk positioned at the general's door, across the E Ring corridor from the big room; no one saw Maude without seeing McNair first.
He'd arrived at the Pentagon at 5:30 a.m., turned on the lights, flipped on the coffee machine, checked his email and the general's calendar. He'd seen that the boss had a 9 a.m. meeting for eight planned for a small conference room in his suite. Only six chairs were positioned around the room's table, so McNair had dragged in another two and shoehorned them into the corners.
At 7:30 he'd crossed the E Ring corridor and stepped into another conference room - this one much larger, with a table that sat 20 - for his weekly colonels' meeting, a forum for cross-pollination among the personnel staff's branches. Most officers in the room had far more experience at the Pentagon: McNair had managed to avoid the building for all but the last three months of a 25-year career. He'd served instead on the West Coast and in Korea and El Paso. He'd spent 5-1/2 years in Hawaii — his wife and two kids had liked that — and commanded a new battalion of personnel specialists in Kentucky.
His arrival had coincided with the staff's move into its new space. Four-fifths of the Pentagon was a dingy fossil of World War II-era plumbing and wiring, asbestos-lined walls, cramped work spaces, worn furniture. But as part of the building's first real makeover, one-fifth had been stripped to its concrete bones and rebuilt, and it was in this "new wedge" that McNair and company now worked.
When the agency had moved into the cubicle farm in late June, a lot of its people had worried the new arrangement would be noisy, and that so big a space would be impersonal, soulless; "Dilbertsville," some called it. It had turned out to be remarkably quiet, its conversations muffled by partitions, springy carpet, and a ceiling of acoustic tiles suspended 8 feet, 4 inches off the floor.
And it was certainly safer than the rest of the Pentagon: The wedge's skin of limestone, brick and concrete had been reinforced with a lattice of steel, and girded with sheets of Kevlar, the woven material from which bulletproof vests are made. The windows were steel-framed, weighed close to a ton, and were said to be blast-proof.
___
The colonels' meeting broke up. Phil McNair returned to his office. Maj. Kip Taylor, the general's military assistant, mentioned that he planned to run some errands down on the Pentagon's concourse of shops and snack bars. Hold on, McNair said. He had a pile of dirty shirts in the bottom of his wall locker. Would the major mind dropping them by the dry cleaner?
No problem, Taylor replied. McNair grabbed a wad of light-green shirts and handed them over. A visiting general dropped by. McNair chatted with him for a few minutes, then hurried to answer some email before his next meeting.
Back across the E Ring, Marilyn Wills rehearsed her presentation as Serva listened. When she finished, she asked whether she'd forgotten anything. No, Serva assured her, I think you covered it all. Wills stacked the papers she'd take with her, then phoned home to ensure that the kids were off to school.
A floor below her, Kevin Shaeffer left an uneventful morning meeting and sat back down at a desk decorated with pictures of his wife, Blanca. They'd met at Annapolis, where she'd trailed him by a year, and it sometimes seemed she had stepped into his life straight from a beer commercial. She was olive-skinned and brown-eyed, and adventurous, and crazy for motorcycles and golf.
She was smarter than he was, too. While he'd zigzagged around the Pacific on cruisers and destroyers, Blanca had blazed through a Navy master's program in engineering. They'd been married for almost six years.
As he trolled through his email, Shaeffer noticed a buzz of voices outside the cubicle, and heard the volume turned up on a television. He stood and peered over the partition around his desk to the watch section, whose sailors were scrambling to start VCRs, shouting times to each other, obviously responding to crisis. On the big monitors over their heads were images of the World Trade Center. Thick black smoke gushed from one of the towers.
It was 8:55 a.m.
___
Wills stepped into the empty conference room, arranged her papers and calendar at her place at the table, and noticed the room was freezing. She strode back to her cubicle. "Quick meeting," Serva said.
"I wish," Wills replied. "It's freezing in there." She grabbed an Army-issue black wool cardigan from the back of her chair.
At 9 o'clock, when McNair and his assistant arrived for the meeting, 10 people waited in the conference room, eight of them around the long table and another couple — guests from outside agencies — along the wall. Everyone stood. "Have a seat," the colonel told them. He took his place at the table's head, and nodded to the major on his left; briefings typically moved clockwise around the table.
Out in the big room, Serva turned on the small TV that she and Wills used to monitor action on Capitol Hill. Her neighbors, overhearing talk of a plane crash, began to wander over. Soon half a dozen people were crowded around the set.
Downstairs, all 30 people in the Navy Command Center's main room were watching the monitors, and a small crowd had formed in the aisle outside Shaeffer's cubicle. A whispered question — Think it's an accident? — came and went, came again. Surely it was possible, on a morning with unlimited visibility, to miss one skinny building in all that sky.
Then, on the screens, a dot appeared to the right of the towers. It crossed the sky over Manhattan, disappeared behind one of the buildings.
The picture bloomed orange. Everyone in the Command Center gasped as if punched in the stomach. Shaeffer looked at his watch.
It was 9:03.
___
Betty Maxfield was headed into the big room upstairs right about then. She had heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, but assumed it was an accident, and had put it out of her mind; her thoughts were on a new brochure she was putting together that profiled the Army's ranks.
Maxfield was the service's demographer. From her office on the Pentagon's far side she tracked the effectiveness of Army advertising, monitored soldiers' morale, consulted databases to answer questions from the brass: Are we promoting people according to any bias? Does pregnancy affect readiness? Are soldiers of all races, sexes and faiths afforded equal access to training?
It was exciting work for a woman who saw patterns and trends where others saw ledger columns, the kind of work she'd found at the Peace Corps, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Defense Manpower Data Center before she'd joined the Army staff. She was among the best-educated people in the new wedge that morning: She held a doctorate in educational statistics, which made the 58-year-old New Yorker "Doc Maxfield" to her colleagues.
She had two appointments in the cubicle farm. She first met with a lieutenant colonel about a detail of the Army's recruiting policy, then made her way to Tracy Webb, who managed benefits for civilian personnel; Maxfield had recently returned from a leave to attend the National War College, and wanted to ensure that all her papers were in order. Webb's cubicle was within earshot of the people gathered around Marian Serva's TV. Even so, New York never came up. Their conversation revolved around Maxfield's personnel file.
And a scarf: Webb was an Avon representative, and Maxfield had ordered a scarf from her only to find, on receiving it, that it didn't appeal. Now Maxfield asked whether she could return it. She held her checkbook and a government-issue ballpoint pen at the ready, in case Webb said no.
"Absolutely," Webb told her.
In the conference room, Phil McNair heard from three officers on the table's left side, and a civilian who ducked out after his presentation. Next came McNair's assistant, who sat at the table's foot. The colonel turned to Wills. "Marilyn?"
About the same time, a sergeant called Tony Rose and John Frazier to an office off the big room, where some 15 soldiers were gathered silently around a TV. Somebody walked over to John Yates' desk, too, told him, "Hey, John, you gotta see what's going on in New York." Yates strolled the roughly 45 feet to Serva's cubicle, and was astounded by the horror unfolding on the screen. After a few minutes he returned to his desk and called his wife, Ellen. She hadn't seen the New York attacks, but knew of them. "Honey," she said, attempting a joke despite the quaver in her voice, "would you please, for the rest of the day, conduct business from under your desk?"
Yates chuckled. "Yeah, honey," he said, "I will."
He hung up and walked back to Serva's cubicle.
It was 9:35.
___
Kevin Shaeffer returned to his cubicle, where he and his three neighbors spent a few minutes discussing what they'd seen. They were all having trouble digesting it, were awed by its scale and violence. They wondered aloud how many people worked in those buildings, whether they were still straggling in when the planes hit. What time did New Yorkers turn up in their offices? What was it like inside those towers right now?
Shaeffer wished he could call Blanca. She worked down the Potomac in Dahlgren, at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, but that morning she was on the road, up in Massachusetts, and he didn't know how to reach her. He tried to return to work, but couldn't keep his mind on it, and after a few minutes stood up at his desk. He could see one of the large-screen monitors, tuned to CNN, over the partitions. He couldn't look away.
This is an attack, he thought, feeling his anger build. An attack on American soil. He heard somebody outside the cubicle say: "This is war."
Upstairs, Betty Maxfield rose from her chair beside Tracy Webb's desk. "Well, see you later," she said. John Yates, numbed by the TV, turned to leave Marian Serva's cubicle. At the back of the big room, Tony Rose said to Master Sgt. Frazier, "John, you know, we need to be careful." In the conference room, Marilyn Wills, still in the midst of her presentation, glanced at her watch and thought: "I'm taking too long."
At that instant came a terrible sound.
Continue reading: Part 2: Trial by fire at the Pentagon
Out of Nowhere, Part 2 | Trial by fire at the Pentagon
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Pentagon Sept. 11 attack
This photo from a surveillance camera shows the fireball that resulted when the hijacked American Airlines plane slammed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2011.
Looking for Part 1 or the rest of the series? Out of Nowhere | Sept. 11, 2001
That Tuesday had started, as most weekdays did, with Army Staff Sgt. Chris Braman rising long before his wife and three daughters, gulping down coffee and vitamins, and driving in from Springfield as the sun came up. He’d been the first person to arrive at the 45-seat restaurant that served the Army’s top brass. He’d loaded the coffee maker, turned on the stoves, and waited for the cooks to arrive to precook the morning sides, start the soups and cater a twice-weekly prayer breakfast.
The kitchen had needed a few last-minute ingredients for the day's lunch, so once the breakfast was under way, Braman drove an Army van to the commissary at nearby Fort Myer, singing along to a country station on the radio. He'd shopped for an hour, then pulled into the Pentagon's Remote Delivery Facility, where incoming packages are examined. There he'd transferred his groceries to a flatbed golf cart, driven them through a maze of hallways to a service elevator, and ridden it to the third floor.As the time neared 9:30 a.m., Braman had put away his purchases and left his receipt with an accountant. He'd poured himself a bowl of Shredded Wheat, made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and carried his breakfast to his desk, which was wedged in a narrow room lined with fridges and food lockers.
Now Braman ate in front of his computer, logging his purchases into the kitchen inventory between bites. He was joined by his boss, who was carrying his own bowl of cereal. While they talked, Braman noticed that there seemed to be a lot of people hurrying past the open door, but he didn't think much of it. The mess' steward, its top man, walked in. "Hey, Bud," he said, "did you hear what's going on in New York?"
No, Braman said. Look at the CNN Web site, the steward told him. The sergeant jumped onto the Internet and tried to call up the site, but after close to a minute it failed to load. Yeah, the steward said, mine's doing the same thing.
Just then the phone rang. It was Braman's wife, Samaria. "Do you know what's happened in New York?" she asked him. He detected a tremor in her voice.
"No, sweetheart," he replied. "What happened?"
Two airplanes hit the World Trade Center, she said. The kids had a videotape on; she'd only learned about the disaster when Braman's father had called a few minutes before. He'd told her that Chris could be hit next.
"Don't worry about this," Braman told her. "I love you. Don't worry."
As he hung up, the building jerked under his feet. Braman was pitched forward into a wooden liquor cabinet, and a moment later the lights went out and a sergeant burst from another office into the hall. "There's a bomb!" she screamed. "A bomb! Oh my God!" The floor rolled. To Braman, who grew up outside Los Angeles, it felt just like an earthquake.
___
One floor down and 200 feet clockwise around the mammoth Pentagon doughnut, in the big room of cubicles occupied by the Army's deputy chief of staff for personnel, the moment felt significantly different.
A Boeing 757-200 airliner, laden with jet fuel, throttle open wide, had torn into the building's "new wedge."
Security officer John Yates was picked up and hurled 30 feet. Sgt. Maj. Tony Rose, punched into a ceiling column, watched as the glass in the C Ring windows spidered into tiny cubes.
The sound erupted a heartbeat later, a monstrous boom and crunch like a thousand file cabinets toppling at once. To demographer Betty Maxfield, the room seemed to freeze, intact, for a moment, then in slow motion the computers clicked off and the lights failed and a fireball rolled through the cubicle farm like a wave, with bulbous head and tapered tail, and as it passed, everything around it burst into flames. Cabinets overturned, partitions exploded, ceiling tiles burned and danced and fell with their metal frames. The air boiled.
In the conference room, Col. Phil McNair jumped to his feet, hollering, "What the hell was that?" His first thought was of a construction accident — a crane had fallen onto the building, a pipe had burst, something had collapsed. The lights went out, and up near the ceiling at the room's far end, over Marilyn Wills' head, the ceiling tiles lifted and flames rippled out. Wills saw them, too. She curled into a ball in her chair.
Another floor down, in the Navy Command Center, Lt. Kevin Shaeffer was sprawled by the shock wave, then watched from the floor as a roiling, bright orange ball of fire shot toward him and everything — cubicles, desks, ceiling tiles, the building's concrete support columns — everything blew to pieces. Air turned to flame against his skin, his eyes, in his lungs.
The room went dark. Shaeffer, dazed, prone on the carpet, realized his back and head were on fire. He rolled to put himself out, then staggered to his feet. He ran a hand through his hair. His scalp felt wet.
Around him, the Command Center was rubble. Fires burned here and there, and by their light he could see that the watch section had vanished. His own desk, five feet from where he'd been thrown, was gone, too, in its place a mountain of broken metal and masonry, ripped chunks of partition, smashed computer parts. Shaeffer scanned the room. Cubicles, all of the cubicles, were demolished. The ceiling had collapsed. Electrical wires dangled, sparking and hissing. Broken water pipes gushed. "This can't be happening," he said out loud.
He saw none of the 29 others who'd been in the room. From the dark came groans and whimpers, the unconscious sounds of the dying, but those who made them were invisible. "Is anybody here?' Shaeffer hollered. "Can anyone hear me?'
No one answered. Thoughts collided in his head: He had to stay alive. He had to see Blanca again. And he had very little time — the air, already reeking of kerosene, was filling with a choking black smoke. He had to move.
But where? When the power failed, would the electric locks on the center's steel doors have frozen open, or shut? He might clamber over the mountains of wreckage blocking the doors only to find them impassible, and by then it might be too late to find another way out. Shaeffer instead set off in the dark toward the building's center, where there was no door at all.
___
John Yates came to his senses to find that his death was at hand. He could not breathe. He could not see. The room was ablaze around him. The metal furniture jumbled all about was hot enough to raise blisters. He heard screams. He wasn't sure that some weren't his.
His glasses remained on his face. They were smeared with something — unburned jet fuel, which Yates mistook for blood. He carefully took them off, folded them, and slipped them into his shirt pocket, then stumbled toward the big room's interior.
In the second-floor conference room, Marilyn Wills found herself slumped beside a door that opened onto the E Ring corridor, the outermost of the Pentagon's five concentric hallways. She had no memory of crossing the room to reach it; she simply materialized there. The left side of her face felt burned. Her bangs were singed. The room, chilly just seconds before, was scorching, and the darkness was absolute. She could see nothing. Phil McNair, at the far end of the table, was trying to calm everyone over the screams of a secretary. "OK, people," the colonel was saying, "we gotta get out of here."
Wills groped for the doorknob, found it, gave it a turn, pulled. The door stayed put. "This won't open," she yelled. "We can't get out this way." She waited for a reply, but none came. In fact, she heard no sound at all. Eleven people had been in the room. Now she seemed to be by herself. She felt a panic rise until it buzzed in her ears. My God, she thought, I'm going to die in here.
It took a moment to force the fear back. No, she thought. You're not going to die. You're going to calm down. She took a deep breath. Smoke was filling the room. She crawled the length of the table, passed Col. McNair's chair. She encountered no one, heard no one.
The heat intensified as she neared the door to the big room. Wills started to tug off her sweater. She'd pulled an arm out when someone grabbed her back and latched onto her belt. "Who is that?" she cried.
Lois Stevens, a civilian who'd been sitting to her left at the meeting, spoke up. "Are you OK?" Wills asked her.
"I'm OK," Stevens said. She sounded remarkably calm.
"Hold onto me," Wills told her. Their faces were inches apart, but Wills could see nothing of her colleague. "OK," Stevens said, tightening her grip on the lieutenant colonel's belt, "I've got you."
___
Phil McNair was confident that whatever had happened, it had been very near the conference room, and that conditions would be better in the cubicle farm. He could hear others crawling toward the door with him. Get everyone out, he told himself, and they'll be OK.
Once over the threshold he realized he was mistaken. The larger room was black, the air incredibly hot, and smoke — greasy, opaque, laden with the odor of burning plastic and electrical wire - was quickly filling the space. He could hear screams, and fire crackling, and furniture crashing, and the ceiling's continued collapse, and layered atop these sounds were the whoops of the Pentagon's fire alarms, and a recorded voice on the public-address system, its tone eerily calm: "There is an emergency in the building. Please evacuate immediately. There is an emergency in the building. Please evacuate immediately."
Crawling, McNair turned toward the E Ring. The heat grew even fiercer, and as he neared the door to the corridor he saw bright orange through the crack along its bottom. He reversed course, yelling, "We've got to get out the other way."
The other way was via the door to the Fourth Corridor, on the far side of the cubicle farm. He and his people would have to cross it quickly, before the smoke dropped all the way to the floor, or fire devoured the room, or they were caught in a secondary explosion. The big room's partitions created a maze of blind alleys. McNair, like everyone else, was new to the place, and did not know it well. And like everyone else, he couldn't see a thing.
___
From the floor near his desk, Sgt. Maj. Tony Rose watched the ceiling's acoustic tiles ripped to powder, saw the metal grid that held them in place fall, the fluorescent lights flutter on their wires. Halfway across the cubicle farm the floor had split open and shoved upwards, and through this opening black smoke barreled in, climbed to the torn ceiling and shot toward the broken windows behind him.
Master Sgt. John Frazier had been blown under his desk by the concussion. Rose yelled at him to help clear the room. The building was laced with gas lines, electric cables, propane tanks. Another explosion seemed only a matter of time.
While Frazier led a file of visibly frightened coworkers to the Fourth Corridor, Rose met up with Lt. Col. Victor M. Correa, a 44-year-old personnel analyst. They crawled the length of the aisle along the windows, pointing people they found toward the exit, then split up to explore the lanes that dissected the cube farm.
Wriggling low, staying beneath the smoke, the two checked passages and cubicles for the injured or lost, but found that the farther they pushed into the room's middle, the darker and hotter it got, the thicker the smoke became. Unable to get past the midpoint, they groped their way to the main Fourth Corridor exit.
The hall was filled with smoke, too, and over the whooping alarms Rose and Correa could hear cries for help from the direction of the E Ring. They found a janitor's closet, tore off their T-shirts, soaked them in the closet's sink, and tied them across their noses and mouths.
Back in the corridor they crawled toward the voices, only to find their way blocked. The Pentagon's renovated hallways were equipped with metal curtains that sprang from panels hidden in the walls and unfolded along tracks in the ceiling. They were designed to contain smoke and heat, to keep damage from spreading. Unfortunately, like the flood-control doors on a sinking ship, they also pinched shut avenues of escape.
Now, as Rose and Correa crawled nearer the E Ring, a fire door accordioned out of the left wall before them. Correa wedged himself between the closing door and the right wall, and was able to stop its advance. Rose slipped through the gap.
In the first seconds after the fireball flashed past her, Betty Maxfield ran to the E Ring door, saw the glow beneath it, and retreated back to Tracy Webb's desk, just outside the conference room. She heard a male voice yelling that the air was easier to breathe near the floor, dropped to her knees, and froze there, unsure where to turn.
Maxfield was merely a visitor to this part of the Pentagon. She had no feel for its layout, knew of no exits other than that to the E Ring. She was, she realized, helplessly lost. The fire alarms whooped. "There is an emergency in the building," the recorded voice said. "Please evacuate immediately."
By this time, Marilyn Wills had crawled from the conference room, Lois Stevens clinging to her belt. She'd seen the fire's glow beneath the door to the E Ring hall, had turned away from it, and had run into someone in the dark — Maj. Regina M. Grant, who'd been with them at the meeting. They'd pushed into the cubicle farm to find a large form looming overhead. "Who is that?" Wills yelled.
"John Yates," the figure answered. He was standing upright in the smoke. "Get up," he said, "and come with me."
"No!" Wills screamed. "The smoke's too thick!' Yates strode off, Grant following at a crawl, Wills and Stevens trailing behind. The ceiling sprinklers kicked on, dousing their backs as they moved away from the conference room, and after a minute, they came upon Betty Maxfield, crouched low on the floor.
Maxfield thought she saw the dim shapes of people around her. As one crawled by, she grabbed an ankle — a man's ankle — and held on. It was McNair. He kept crawling, and Maxfield fell in behind him, and as she did, a third person grabbed her ankle, and a ragged daisy chain began snaking its way across the room.
People at the head of the file made turns that took them, and those just behind, into dead-end cubicles instead of aisles, and as they regained their bearings someone else took over the lead. Invariably, those now at the front would make a wrong turn, and someone farther back in the line would take over the point, so that it was in a series of slow, frustrating jerks that the column leap-frogged toward the Fourth Corridor.
With each minute that passed, the smoke thickened, until every breath Wills took felt as if it were shredding her throat. She soaked her sweater under a sprinkler, pressed the wet wool into her mouth, sucked in air through the fabric. It was the first clean lungful she'd inhaled since the lights went out.
Soon Lois Stevens stopped. "Colonel Wills," she said, "I can't go on." Wills could make her out dimly in the dark, clawing at her throat. The colonel handed her the sweater, told her to breathe through it, then passed it to others in the line. "You have to keep going," she told Stevens. "Get on my back if you can't go any farther."
The caravan turned down a hallway that those in front thought led to the Fourth Corridor exit. Shouts soon came to those farther back: They couldn't get out that way.
With that, Phil McNair decided he was probably going to die. Their escape routes were blocked. The smoke had dropped to within a foot of the floor, and the heat was getting fiercer, and if they didn't get away from both in the next few minutes, they'd be overwhelmed.
McNair had been an administrative officer for his entire Army career, and while the job had seen him shipped to some hot spots, it always had been as part of the vast, rear-echelon infrastructure that supports every Army deployment; the colonel had spent no time on the front lines. The same was true for most of the officers in the big room that Tuesday: They were accountants, insurance specialists, logisticians, planners, managers of various stripe.
Still, they were Army officers, trained in weapons and tactics and crisis management in addition to their specialties. And this, McNair thought, was a crummy way to die — on the floor of an office, among file cabinets. In paperwork.
___
Just past the fire door, Tony Rose found a couple of soldiers stumbling blindly in the smoke, screamed at them to get low, pointed them toward safety. Other voices reached him from deeper in the gloom. He crawled past another fire door, which for some reason had failed to deploy, and a little farther on found Tracy Webb standing over Maj. Regina Grant.
Moments before, Grant had heard someone yelling at her to "Come toward the light," and had wound up here, separated from the daisy chain still crawling through the big room.
Someone came up behind Rose — he couldn't make out who it was in the smoke — and led the women out. He pushed on, hollering "Is anyone here?" He could hear pieces of the Pentagon collapsing around him, and small explosions, yells and screams, and the alarm, that recording: "There is an emergency in the building. Please evacuate immediately." His own shouts were almost lost in the din.
Rose decided he could go no farther. He was flat on his stomach, his nose an inch from the floor. He couldn't breathe, even through his wet T-shirt. As he shouted and struggled to tune his ear to answers, the smoke suddenly darkened. It was getting thicker, Rose thought, then realized, no — a fire door was closing behind him.
A floor below, in the burning ruins of the Navy Command Center, Kevin Shaeffer clawed over tangles of smashed furniture and ceiling tile, broken glass and concrete, vowing silently to see his wife again, yelling at himself as he made for the room's rear: "Keep moving! Keep moving, Kevin!"
He knew he'd been at least singed by the explosion. His face and back hurt, and evidently he had cut his left hand, because he could feel blood running down his arm. He had little time to dwell on these injuries. Breathing was becoming ever more difficult; in addition to the smoke, the air was damp with vaporized jet fuel, unburned and caustic, and each breath he drew seared his lungs. And Shaeffer found his path all but blocked by a spastically jerking curtain of severed, but live, electrical cables. The sparking ends hung within a couple feet of the piled debris on which the lieutenant scrambled. Beside them, a thick tongue of water poured from a ruptured main.
___
On the Pentagon's third floor, a chef dashed into Staff Sgt. Chris Braman's office, eyes wide, asking: What do we do? Braman ran past the man into the kitchen, which still had lights, and shut off the stoves. The hall was crowded with people running and shouting and ordering evacuation. In the time it took Braman to lock the kitchen door, they were gone. He was alone.
He walked the empty halls and stairs and kicked open an emergency door on the Pentagon's northeast side. A crowd had gathered at the Remote Delivery Facility, where little more than an hour before he'd been unloading groceries. All eyes seemed to be on something beyond his view, around the Pentagon's curving perimeter.
Braman started toward the throng. On the way he encountered a Pentagon police officer trying to carry a wounded soldier and a baby. The cook took the baby, whose hair had been singed, and who didn't make a sound on the 65-yard walk to a first-aid station.
It was there that Braman got his first glimpse of the new wedge's outer wall. Flames shot from the windows and a large, irregular hole in the limestone. Smoke erupted in plumes that folded over themselves, curled into tubes, swirled into dirty brown twisters. Braman handed off the baby and without thinking, ran for the breach.
As he neared it he saw four men half walking, half carrying an injured woman to an ambulance that had stopped on a nearby road. He recognized her as a finance officer who'd helped him with some papers during the summer. Her clothes had been blown off. She was a dark-complected black woman, but the back of her body, from head to calves, was a bright, wet pink.
The four dropped the woman off and headed back for others. Braman followed. They crossed a debris-littered helipad and a lawn charred and crunchy underfoot, passed a fire engine, minivan and sports car veiled in flame. The hiss and rumble of the fire grew. He could hear metal bending, concrete splintering. Screams. Glancing to an upper floor, he saw a dead man in a window, still holding a coffee cup.
Staff Sgt. Braman was not a typical cook, in the Army or out. He stood 5-foot-9, but had 20-inch biceps, and at 33, could crank out pushups until he lost count. He'd scored a perfect 300 in his Army physical fitness tests.
The elite Rangers had stolen him from the kitchen of his regular Army unit in 1996. They put him through jump school at Fort Benning, taught him combat search and rescue, made him a scuba diver. Before he was assigned to the Pentagon, in August 2000, he had spent an average of 218 nights a year away from home, often on missions so secret he couldn't tell his wife where he'd been.
Now he recognized where he was. The sounds, the smells, the sights, were those of a battle.
Braman reached inside his uniform, tore off his T-shirt, tied it around his face, and followed the others into the building.
Continue reading: Part 3: Call of duty at the Pentagon
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